Case Number 02920: Small Claims Court

For Da Love Of Money

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All Rise...

The Charge

A Movie about Mad Cash, Crazy Peeps, and Sexy Muthas

The Case

Dre Mitchell is a thirty-year-old ass out loser bum living with his divorced
moms in 'da heart of 'da hood. He has a trifling chickenhead girlfriend named
Tasha who's constantly prowling for cheese and bling bling (and a way of sharing
her STDs) His best fiend Max is a grimy G whose krunkalicious momma Dre
fantasizes about having sex with. The neighborhood pimp is a hardcore ho baller
specializing in girls of all shapes, sizes…and physical abnormalities. And
Boom, the local drag queen, is constantly rolling out, accosting Dre for favors.
Just when it seems like his life can't get any more irritating, a local thug
steals a bag of benjamins from an armored car accident and hides it in Dre's
backyard. Like they say, good news travels fast, but when it's tied up with
gettin' paid, it goes baller supersonic. Soon, everyone in town is trying to get
on Dre's jock, hoping he will spread around a little of his new, ill-gotten ice.
But Dre is clueless. He doesn't even know the loot is there. But that doesn't
mean that he won't spend the rest of the day fighting off the advances and
insolence of his neighborhood. After all, people will do some crazy sh-izzle
For Da Love of Money.

For Da Love of Money is a movie that wallows in blatant, borderline
offensive stereotyping hoping to try and milk out some meager laughs via cheap
shots. It's not that the foundational premise (local loser is mistaken for
having a huge ill-gotten bankroll) is inherently flawed or couldn't support good
character or situational humor. Nor are the actors guilty of completely
exploiting their race for the sake of a snicker. No, in the less than subtle
hands of writer/director Pierre, For Da Love of Money stomps all over
that pulp friction cultural tightrope that so many comedians comment/complain
about, to wit, that only a movie made by black people could get away with the
patently politically incorrect portrayals given to the characters here. For
Da Love of Money is offensiveness in the guise of farce. The men are all
shiftless womanizers. The ladies are all over-sexed, disease-ridden bitch hos.
The local pimp dresses like Dolemite with Down's syndrome and Boom, the local
drag/slag homosexual is so flamboyantly gay that both Peter Allen and Quentin
Crisp have recently risen from the grave specifically to take advanced mincing
lessons from this ghetto queen. Not a single archetype is avoided or
unexploited. Like a love letter to the Aryan race, For Da Love of Money
uses race as an excuse for stupidity, a lack of morals, and laziness. And we're
supposed to be laughing at it, too.

But even when it ventures beyond the painful pigeonholing of an entire
culture, For Da Love of Money can't seem to find a viable, productive
level of levity. The jokes are all of the same "yo mama—yo
wiener—yo stink breath" variety, the site gags are almost all sexual
in nature (and shown off screen to maintain the light "R" level of the
movie) except for the midget prostitute who rides a scooter (nothing sexy
about that), and the plot has no direct linear arch. The unraveling vignette
structure constantly highlights that there is nothing really substantial for the
film to hold on to, so it really bucks wildly and uncontrollably toward the end.
For Da Love of Money suffers from the intrinsic flaw of being
someone's—in this case, triple-slash Pierre's—individualistic idea
of what comedy is. Unfortunately, it's as insular and insipid as said private
in-jokes can be. You can't fault the entire cast's fault for what one mad
mindset has them doing and saying. Maurice Patton knows his Boom is nothing more
than a GLADD boycott waiting to occur, so he tries to infuse the character with
as much childlike wonder and earnestness as possible. Similarly, Sacha Kemp's
slutty Tasha is all innuendo and crudeness, an abstract portrait of mean
spirited misogyny. Yet she never lets us forget that, deep down inside, she is
an attractive, complex, and decidedly vulnerable woman. If it looks like the
actors are out of sync with their "creator's" vision, it's because
they truly seem to be. They want to be starring in a wild and brash comedy of
color, using truth and subtlety to sell silly and sexy laughs. But pompous
Pierre only wants them as highlights to his hyperactive star presence as the
cyclonic center of this welfare fantasyland. It doesn't help that Lone Moniker
is the thespian equivalent of a pinball, bouncing off the scenery, the other
actors, and the limitations of his words and vision hoping to score some points
of value. But his is nothing more than just an extended effort in Tilt and
Reset. Like the majority of For Da Love of Money, from its humor to its
characterization, there is no payoff or no punch line to the proceeding 90
minutes of bedlam.

On the one hand, Columbia TriStar should be commended for taking a chance
and releasing this low budget, demographically skewed film on DVD. This is not a
movie that will sell millions (or even thousands) of units. But on the other
hand, they give it such a low rent, buzzing below the radar presentation that
you can smell the flop sweat stinking up their bottom line as well. As for
image, this is a full frame presentation of a print that was obviously conceived
differently in its original aspect ratio (we learn this from the disclaimer that
opens the film). We appear to get an open matte, not a pander and slander
optical printer ballet. The picture quality is fair to poor with bad color
correction (a couple of characters appear orange), lack of clarity, and meager
depth of contrast. Equally uneventful is the Dolby Digital 5.1 sound offering.
Frankly, with the flat, front channel heavy aural presentation, it's hard to see
just what the other speakers would (or could or even can) do. There is limited
use of hip-hop and rap music, and even when present, the system never comes
alive to create a sense of immersion. Cap this DVD off with three trailers, each
showcasing different genres of low-budget urban filmmaking, and you've got a
below average package for a completely sub-par film.

While it's true that there are a lot of things that people will do in the
name of a paycheck, here's wagering that no amount of moolah will get a once
bitten film fan to sit through this dead headed daffiness more than once. For
Da Love of Money is, for da love of God, awful.